When Kathy Yelick, a highly respected computer scientist from UC Berkeley, agreed to take over as director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab, heads turned. After a career of contemplating deep systems concepts, why would someone want to tackle such a monumental administrative task? But for her, moving from academia to actually building and running a service based on that research has allowed her to “live the vision.” Full story.

PEOPLE

Alivisatos Speaks at ACS
Presidential Symposium

Alivisatos

Researchers at a special Preseidential Symposium, taking place at the American Chemical Society annual meeting in New Orleans this week, will discuss future sources of energy. Among the speakers is Berkeley Lab Associate Director and Materials Sciences Division Director Paul Alivisatos. He will describe potential advantages, and challenges of developing solar cells using nanoscale materials. Go here for more on the symposium.

Climate Change Creates
Economic Opportunity

Today's investors should know that while solving global warming will add costs, it’s a bargain compared with the economic cost of unchecked climate change. And fixing this problem will create an historic economic opportunity. For example, using a platform they developed as postdocs at UC Berkeley, the founding scientists of a company called Amyris — including Physical Biosciences Division Director Jay Keasling — have re-engineered yeast to ferment sugar into pure hydrocarbon fuels. Unlike ethanol, the fuel has the energy density of gasoline and can be shipped through existing pipelines and pumped into any car now on the road. Full story.

RESEARCH UPDATE

First Look at Protein
Synthesis Mechanism

Ribosome between optical tweezers

Research by UC Santa Cruz molecular biologist Harry Noller and his collaborators has led to the first direct observations of the mechanism for protein synthesis in living cells. The researchers — which includes Berkeley Lab physical bioscientists Carlos Bustamante and Ignacio Tinoco — used a laser apparatus called "optical tweezers" to probe the physical steps of the ribosome machine as it translates genetic code into a protein molecule. Full story.